1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image processing method for supporting a work of creating an image to be printed by a printing apparatus discontinuously ejecting ink on a medium to land the ink on a target position.
2. Related Art
An ink jet printer performing printing by discontinuously ejecting ink on various mediums such as paper, cloth, and film has been known as a printing apparatus. The ink jet printer arranges fine dots formed of ink droplets onto the medium to form an image. Such an ink jet printer is provided with a plurality of ink cartridges filled with ink of a plurality of colors and can perform printing with various colors. When replenishing ink, only the cartridge may be replaced. Accordingly, the ink jet printer is used to print, for example, a face of discount tickets (coupons) of products distributed on counters of stores.
Recently, the ink jet printer is used for immediate color printing of various kinds of coupons for purchased products, cooperating with to the known POS system in the store. For example, when a barcode of a specific product is read on the counter of the store, product information is transmitted to a definite-purpose printer through the POS system. The printer has stored in advance a correspondence between the product information transmitted from the POS system and a coupon to be printed, and the immediately prints and issues a predetermined coupon on the basis of the information transmitted from the POS system.
However, as a business model formed by the issuing service of the coupon, for example, in a case where a company B later produces and sells products similar to products produced by a company A, the company B issues an available coupon when a customer purchases the product of the company B for social publicity and sales promotion of the company B. The company B pays the expenses of the discount. When the customer purchases the product of the company A in the store, the coupon is issued. Accordingly, the company B can obtain the publicity for the fact that a similar product from a company other than the company A is provided, and through the money discounted by the coupon can motivate the customer to purchase the product of the company B.
In the business model, an advertisement agency relays between the store and the company B, a production and sales company of the issuing system of coupons, a maker selling a printer and the other hardware constituting the issuing system and supplies obtain profits.
For example, in the above-described business model, there are many cases where expenses for the supplies used in the printer are paid to the printer producing company according to the amount thereof used. Particularly, there are many cases where the expenses for ink are paid according to the use amount thereof. That is, for the ink jet printer, the expenses are not paid for the replacing ink cartridge, and the use amount is calculated by the number of ejections of ink to pay the expense according to the use amount. For this reason, no matter who pays the expenses for the ink, there is a desire to reduce the ink use amount as far as possible. A technique of managing the ink use amount is disclosed in JP-A-2007-118490.
However, a face of the coupon issued in the above-described business model needs to function as advertisement of the product from the viewpoint of product publicity. For this reason, the company B or the like, as the real issuing source of the coupon, has a desire to arouse a customer's interest by printing an image, on which a design designed by an image creator such as a professional designer is concentrated, on the face thereof. Accordingly, when blindly reducing the ink use amount, it is difficult to print with quality in which customers are interest. As a result, the advertisement effect may be decreased, the effect of issuing the coupons may disappear, and the business model may be not satisfied. Of course, it is not limited to the exemplified business model, and there are many reasons for reducing the ink use amount while minimizing the deterioration of image quality.